Tag: PEAC

The Common Core SBAC testing scheme is the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory annual testing system mandated by Governor Dannel Malloy and his administration.

Designed to fail a vast share of Connecticut’s students, the SBAC test is aligned to the Common Core, rather than what is actually taught in Connecticut’s classrooms.

If Governor Malloy and his allies in the corporate Education reform industry get their way, the SBAC test will continue to be used to rate and rank order students, teachers and schools. For them, it is a mechanism to ensure students, and teachers are deemed to be failures, thereby paving the way to turn even more Connecticut public schools over to privately owned, but publicly funded charter school companies and others that seek to profit off the privatization of public education.

With the Connecticut legislature’s approval, the Malloy administration has been busy turning Connecticut’s public schools into little more than testing factories and profit centers for private entities, many of which have become some of Malloy’s biggest campaign donors.

One of the areas that remains unresolved is how the SBAC testing scam will be used in Connecticut’s teacher evaluation process. Malloy and his ilk want to require that the results of the unfair tests be used as a key tool in determining how well teachers are doing in the classroom.

Teachers, their unions and public school advocates recognize that there are much better teacher evaluation models that could be used and don’t rely on the use of standardized tests to determine which teachers are succeeding, which teachers need additional training and which individuals should be removed from the classroom.

In 2010, state legislators created the PEAC (Performance Evaluation Advisory Council), to come up with guidelines for evaluating teachers. In January 2012, the panel agreed to have nearly one-quarter of a teachers’ rating linked to the state exam scores.

Consensus then vanished, however, after the governor proposed linking the new evaluations to teacher certification and pay, and union leaders grew wary that the tests were becoming too high stakes. Complicating the issue further was the rollout of a controversial new state exam that engendered even more skepticism among union officials and many teachers about using the tests for evaluations.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that the SBAC test is NOT an appropriate tool to evaluate teachers, the Malloy administration remains committed to implementing their policy of failure.

The controversy has meant that the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC) has been unable to come to a consensus on how to proceed with the implementation of Malloy’s teacher evaluation plan.

As a way to move the debate forward, the Connecticut Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers tried, unsuccessfully, to use this week’s PEAC meeting to push the group to, at the very least, define what purpose of Connecticut’s so-called Mastery Testing system.

In a recent CEA blog post, the union explained that at the meeting CEA’s Executive Director told the group,

“The threshold question is, ‘What is the role of the mastery test?’ I hold that it’s to give a 50,000-foot view that can inform resource allocation, curriculum alignment, professional development, and instructional strategies at the district level, at the building level, or even the classroom level.”

Adding,

“That is where we gain knowledge about things like social justice, about fiscal or community needs…

The President of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, concurred saying that the tests

“were never designed to evaluate teachers,” adding, “If we return to that, we’re going to return to teachers teaching to the test, because their jobs depend on it.”

The CEA and AFT leadership are absolutely right on this one.

SBAC is an “inappropriate tool for evaluating teachers.”

As mentioned, there are plenty of teacher evaluation models that the state could and should be using.

Rather than maintaining their war on Connecticut’s children, teachers and schools, Connecticut’s elected and appointed officials should dump Malloy’s proposed teacher evaluation program and shift to one that is fair, efficient and effective.

With Election Day close at hand, candidates for the Connecticut State Senate and Connecticut House of Representatives should be making it clear that if elected on November 8th they’ll shift gears and actually do what is right for Connecticut’s students, teachers and public schools.